Thursday Jan 17, 2013

The most common reason is if cache is on in OBI and this query has been previously run. Cache will store the result of this same query. If a dashboard or same Analysis is being run, even after the STAR ETL process has been run, cached data can be returned. Turning off cache will query directly against the database and return most up to date data. This can also have some performance impacts. Based on the environment customers can enable or disable or flush the cache based on their needs of data and performance. See OBI for how to turn off cache or flush cache.

For P6 Analytics version 1.2 and greater the P6 extended schema is used for calculating data that is then pulled into STAR. If the P6 extended schema services are not running the data there could be stale. Check the P6 extended schema services - global services and project services- and make sure they have run recently. For changes on the project to be published the project must cross the threshold defined for the project service - such as amount of changes or time since last change. See P6 Extended Schema White Paper or P6 EPPM Installation and Configuration guide for more details on the services. Services can also be viewed in the JOBSVC table. The extended schema services are the means for a large amount of updates that would make it into the data warehouse. Some of the values from the extended schema map directly to physical fields in the PMDB but denormalized and calculated data is held primarily in the tables updated by the extended schema services.

Another reason is if the ETL process failed. Generally the ETL process runs on a regularly scheduled interval without any failures. Causes of failures could be loss of connection, bad data, change in system privileges, etc. It is good practice to monitor the staretlprocess.log and staretl.html files located in the <installation directory>\star\log folder. An undetected failure could make P6 Analytics appear as if there were no updates to the data.